Kenny Everett

Kenny Everett, original name Maurice James Christopher Cole, (born Dec. 25, 1944, Liverpool, Eng.—died April 4, 1995, London), British disc jockey and television entertainer known for his wacky, inventive comedic style and often controversial irreverence. His successful jump from radio to television helped redefine the role of radio personality as a springboard to other areas of entertainment.

The son of a tugboat captain, he grew up in the suburbs of Liverpool. Following a brief period at seminary school, he worked in the advertising department of a shipping publication. He also made “air-check” style audition tapes, which he sent to the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) and to Radio London, the slickest of the pirate radio stations anchored along the coastline of the United Kingdom in the mid-1960s. Upon being hired by Radio London, he changed his name (a legal precaution undertaken by most of the station’s disc jockeys) to Kenny Everett.

A sometimes surreal sense of humour that was much indebted to the Beatles and to The Goon Show, the influential British radio comedy of the 1950s that starred Peter Sellers, Spike Milligan, and Harry Secombe, soon established Everett as one of the outstanding personalities of pirate radio. When in 1967 the BBC launched Radio 1, the first land-based British pop station, Everett became one of its original recruits. His famed sense of humour resulted, however, in the end of his career as a live broadcaster on Radio 1 when in 1970, in response to a news item, he suggested that the wife of the transport minister had passed her driving test by bribing the examiner.

Everett returned to Radio 1 in 1972 with a prerecorded—and thus censorable—Saturday morning show. He taped it in a home studio, where his experiments with sound, especially with character voices, created a unique and instantly recognizable hybrid of oddball comedy and music radio. He left Radio 1 to join commercial Capital Radio at its inception in October 1973, first presenting a weekday breakfast (morning drive-time) show and then, as his blossoming television career took more of his time, moving to weekend mornings. The well-received The Kenny Everett Video Show (1978–80) and its successors, including The Kenny Everett Television Show (1981–88), showcased Everett’s fascination for what could be done with the ever-evolving technologies of television, mirroring his earlier audio improvisations. A return to the BBC to host a show on Radio 2 was cut short when he was again sacked, in 1984 for making a risqué joke about British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.

In the late 1980s he left television to focus solely on his radio work at newly launched station Capitol Gold. Open about his own homosexuality, he was also known for his work as a gay rights activist in the last few years of his life.